


The Last Summer Never Comes

by El Staplador (elstaplador)



Category: Seasons In The Sun - Terry Jacks (song)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Strong Language, Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-18
Updated: 2014-06-18
Packaged: 2018-02-05 05:05:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1806346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elstaplador/pseuds/El%20Staplador
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three summers, some other ones in between, and the last spring.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Last Summer Never Comes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Joanne_c](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Joanne_c/gifts).



It was one of those wonderful spring evenings where the shadows are long and black and the sunlight is rose-gold on the Welsh hills. I paid particular attention; it was almost certainly going to be my last.

Neil was asleep in the chair next my bed. I didn't want to wake him; he was smiling at some good dream. I smiled myself. Neil was the best friend I could have had: gracious, forgiving, loyal to the last.

  
He was nine or ten when his family moved in next door to us. His mother was writing a book; this made them all exotic and glamorous, and their arrival was the most exciting thing to happen in Llanbeth since my great-grandfather moved there from Piemonte and opened the fish-and-chip shop.

We were friends from the very beginning, being the right age for each other and both naturally drawn to life outdoors. With or without my horde of brothers and sisters we climbed hills, we climbed trees, we rode our bikes countless miles in the long summer days.

It all changed the day we got to the summit of the Black Peak. That was the summer I turned fourteen. Neil and I had planned the expedition for months beforehand, puzzling out the footpaths and the contours on Papa's Ordnance Survey maps, persuading our respective parents to shell out for decent walking boots, stocking up on chocolate and dried fruit.

We set out early in the morning, before the sun was properly up. As it rose, we climbed up out of the valley, through the line of trees, and broke out onto the steep bare hillside. It was a long climb, a hard climb for a couple of teenagers who thought they knew everything. We soon stopped talking, focused on putting one foot in front of the other, refusing even to entertain the possibility that we might not make it.

All that morning we climbed, stopping occasionally for a swig of water or a square or two of chocolate. I was trying to teach Neil a bit of Italian at the time, and at the breaks I tested him on _sono, sei, è, siamo, siete, sono_ and the alphabet. Occasionally, as we trudged upwards, I heard him muttering _ah, bí, cí_ , and I laughed.

It was close to midday by the time we approached the top of the Peak. I'm ashamed to say my mind was on my lunch rather than the view: I was thinking, another twenty yards and then a cheese sandwich. Even I had to admit that it was something else, though, when I actually saw it: all Wales and half of England, green in the bright August sun, the occasional soft shadow of a cloud, the sharp black shadows, the misty horizon.

'We made it!' I said. I turned to look at Neil, who was a few paces behind me; he was too out of breath to speak, and his face was lit up with the glow of exertion and achievement. As he caught his breath to answer me, he tripped on a stone. Instinctively, I put my arms out to catch him. He clutched at my shoulders.

I held him and steadied him. He looked up at me; he had – has – such striking hazel eyes, and lashes as long as a girl's.

The whole hilltop was silent. The sun was unbearably hot.

He kissed me.

Surprised, I broke away. I wish I hadn't. I wished I hadn't even at the time.

'God,' he said, 'I'm sorry.' He wouldn't look at me.

Pretending that nothing out of the ordinary had happened, I sat down in the grass. 'If I tell you a secret,' I said, 'will you promise never to tell a soul?'

Secrets were a girly kind of thing, but I could trust Neil not to laugh. 'Promise,' he said.

I didn't speak until he sat down too. 'I'd rather kiss you than a girl, anyway.'

'You're just saying that to make me feel better.'

'Cross my throat and hope to die.'

He blinked a bit at that. 'Oh. But you can't, can you? It's against the rules.'

Neil always cared about rules. I didn't.

  
Papa dropped round. He does every evening. He's pushing eighty-five now, and you wouldn't know it. He looks exactly the same now as he did when he was fifty.

He dragged another chair up to my bed. We spoke quietly, so as not to wake Neil.

‘I never expected you to die of this.’ Papa has cancer, too: well-behaved, manageable cancer that he keeps at bay with little pills. His heart will get him long before this does.

‘Not much fun, is it?’ I agreed.

'You know what I mean,' he said. 'Well: you needn't talk about that time if you don't want to. I'm glad you came home, that's all.'

I'm glad I came home, too. But, my God, I had fun when I was there.

I do wonder whether my parents knew who I was, and if they had second thoughts about sending me off to Manchester. Logically, I doubt they even knew what I might find there. It's impossible to describe Canal Street to anyone who wasn't there, and harder still to explain what it meant to me. I was a cabbage-green kid from what felt like the smallest village in Wales, and this was the first time I'd met proper loud music and poppers and men who liked men.

Bernie was part of all that, and he was the most gorgeous devilish fucker I'd ever met. Shaved head, wicked blue eyes. This was the last decade that 'gay' meant two distinct things, depending who you were talking to. Bernie was both of them. He wasn't my first. I lasted a whole year there before I met him. I'd made the most of it. When I did meet him I fell for him, hard. It didn't last. There wasn't anything to last, I suppose; either way, that saved my life. Not that I appreciated it at the time.

Bernie threw me out after a particularly embarrassing scene. I suppose I deserved it. I left Manchester and went home. Mama and Papa didn't ask any questions.

I always meant to go back. One summer, I thought, would put my head back together (and, a treacherous part of me said, would give Bernie time to realise how much he needed me). It didn't happen. Bernie was gorgeous, and he was a callous bastard, and he was doomed.

'Jack?' Papa might have thought I was asleep.

‘He broke my heart, and then he died. Bastard. I couldn’t even hate him properly.’

Papa didn't have to ask who I was talking about. 'If it helps,' he said, 'I hated him. I prayed for him, but I hated him.'

I knew that. Papa told me years ago: _it's not because he was a man. It's because he treated you like dirt_. Eventually I'd come to believe that.

I saw the rosary clutched in his hand, and asked, 'Do you pray for me?'

'Of course I do,' he said. 'I always did. You needed it more than any of the others.'

After I heard that Bernie was ill, I held it together just long enough to make a half-decent best man's speech at Neil's wedding, and then Papa hauled me off to Sant'Agata. I didn't argue. He told Nonna and all the aunts that my heart had been broken – he didn't say by whom – and all that summer, and the next three, I drank red wine with my cousins and sang maudlin songs alternately in English and Italian, and as much Welsh as I could remember.

Years later, when Michelle was at a conference in Turin, she hired a car and drove up there. She said that everyone who speaks English there does so with a Welsh accent. I’d never noticed, myself.

  
I heard her voice in the hall, meeting Papa as he went out. 'Hello, Jackpa.' They've always got on well, those two. He treats her the same as all his other grandchildren.

'Michelle, sweetheart, it's good to see you.' He said something else, but I couldn't hear it.

She came in, carrying no flowers. I was glad. I didn't see why other things had to die just because I was. I could just about sit up to kiss her. 'Hello, my little one. How are your stars?'

She laughed. 'They're fine, and I'm thirty-two.'

'You'll always be my little one,' I told her, and neither of us wanted to think how short a time 'always' was going to be.

  
It was almost an accident, my meeting Michelle at all. I lost touch with Neil after the wedding – he had looked so happy, and so had Steph, that I felt that smearing my disastrous life across their joyful new one would have been an unforgivable intrusion. When Michelle was born I sent a teddy bear. Then came the whole awful time with Bernie's illness. I never even heard that Steph was also ill until it was far too late, and I was in no state to be of any use to Neil at all. After she died I sent a card, that was it, and left poor Neil to manage as best he could on his own with a baby and a post-doc's salary.

  
Three years after Steph died I was at home, working on an OU essay. I was just getting into my stride, actually, and was tempted to ignore the doorbell. I'm glad I didn't.

Neil looked older, thinner, tired. Happy to see me, and nervous.

'Jack,' he said.

'Neil.'

It was awkward. Neither of us knew what to say about anything at all.

'I -' he began. 'I need your help. I've a field trip to Spain. Ten days, leaving next week. I wanted to ask, can you come?'

'Spain?' I echoed.

'Fuerteventura. It's the Cold Canary Current, it makes for a really interesting climate. I don't want to miss this chance... But Karen, who was going to come out with me, has gone down with German measles...'

'You want me to come with you?' It was ridiculously tempting. My deadline wasn't until September, and I could write as well out there as I could here.

'I hope you don't mind my asking,' he said. 'Mum's in America, and I couldn't think of anybody else I'd trust with Michelle. Not who'd have a valid passport, anyway.'

'She can't stay here?' I saw what a stupid thing that was to say the moment I'd said it. Of course he wouldn't leave her now, not since Steph. 'No, of course not.'

'No.' He must have been the only father in the world who would trust his four-year-old with – well, me.

I deliberately didn't think about it too much. 'I'll come,' I said.

  
Michelle was a funny little thing back then, all spindly legs and big solemn eyes. She loved nothing better than stars: every night that week – and these were long, hot, June days that didn’t fade until nine or ten – she begged to be allowed to stay up to watch the stars come out. To Neil, whose mind was on his jellyfish, they were just stars, and so I used to watch with her. When she found out that I knew their names she was enchanted. We found a pocket stargazing guide in the bookcase in the bungalow, and I read her the science and the legends. (Twenty years later she dedicated her own PhD thesis to me. I don't mind admitting that I shed a tear at that.)

‘What’s that one?’ she said, when a meteor fell.

I tried to explain that it wasn’t really a star, but she was having none of that.

  
Next day, she wanted to see where Neil worked, so we walked out across the sand to the little camp the team had put up, her cool little hand in mine. We stopped to look in all the rock pools along the way. Michelle wasn't squeamish; she fished in them and found sea anemones, little scuttling crabs, a starfish. She brought that one out and held it in the palm of her hand.

‘There,’ she said, ‘that’s the one that we saw falling down last night.’

‘Is that right,’ I said.

'They fall into the sea,' she said, 'and they get covered with shells, and they turn into fish.'

She put the starfish gently back in the rock pool. 'Dad said you were sad,' she said. 'You were sad because your friend had died. Like he was sad because my Mum died.'

'That's more or less the way it is,' I admitted. 'Do you remember your Mum?'

She frowned. 'I can't remember what she looked like. I remember her being there.'

Neil came out to meet us at the gate of the site. He seemed surprised to see us, though Michelle had been full of the idea at breakfast and I don't know how he thought I'd have stopped her carrying it through. When she saw him, she let go of my hand to run and wrap herself around his leg. I caught the tenderness in his eyes. It seemed to reach all the way to me.

  
That night, after Michelle and I had gone out for our stargazing, and after Neil had put her to bed, he and I opened a bottle of decent Rioja. He stretched his long legs out on the settee; I sank into one of the armchairs. We could just about reach to clink the glasses.

I couldn't think what to toast, but he said, 'Seasons in the sun.'

I echoed it. 'Seasons in the sun. I'm sorry,' I said, 'that I missed the last four or five, with you.'

'I'm sorry I missed yours.'

'They were a bit grim. Yours too, I expect.'

'You could say that.' He looked straight at me. 'In all my life there were only five or six that were perfect. The year I moved to Llanbeth. The year I met Steph, and the year we married, and the year Michelle was born. The year you and I climbed the Black Peak.'

I caught my breath; I was glad I was sitting down. The intensity of the desire in his eyes would have sent me weak at the knees. 'I liked that one,' I admitted. 'I got the impression that you thought it was a giant mistake.'

'Parts of it,' he said. He paused. 'We could put that one right.'

I was fourteen all over again, but that summer was long gone. 'What about Michelle?'

Neil drained his glass. 'She adores you. She wants you to come home with us. Sounds like a bloody good idea to me.'

It wasn't going to be as simple as that, and he knew it. 'When she goes to school?'

Worry twisted his mouth, but he said, 'She'll already be the kid with no mum. If she can cope with that, she can cope with being the kid with two fathers.'

I finished my own wine, and stood up. I couldn't take much more of this. 'Karen?'

'Karen? Oh, _Karen_. Colleague. Married, two kids, and not interested in me even if I were in her.'

I was wavering. 'What about the rules?'

'Jack,' he said, 'the rules have changed.'

I gave in all at once. 'Thank fuck for that,' I said, as he pulled me down to him.

  
Seasons in the sun. That might have been the best summer, but all the ones after came close.

I'll never see another one. This evening, Michelle watched the sunset with me. Papa said the rosary for me. Neil sat with me, and held my hand as darkness began to fall.

**Author's Note:**

> Llanbeth, Sant'Agata and the Black Peak are all fictional - though there is a village in Italy where English is spoken with a Welsh accent, and another where it's Brummie. Canal Street isn't.


End file.
